I was there when JFK was shot – and I’ve no time for conspiracy theories

Sixty years ago this week, young reporter Peggy Simpson found herself on the spot for one of the biggest news stories of all time. As a new documentary charts the events, she explains to James Rampton why we’re still feeling its impact today

President John F Kennedy and his first lady Jackie, moments before the fatal shot was fired (Getty)

Everyone, it is said, remembers where they were when president John F Kennedy was shot. Reporter Peggy Simpson certainly has no difficulty recalling where she was at that epoch-making time. Sixty years ago, almost to the day, she was in Dallas, an eyewitness to the events that rewrote history.

Talking to The Independent from her home in the US, Simpson, now a sprightly 86, has an extraordinarily vivid recollection of the days that changed America forever.

The reporter, who was the only female journalist working for the Associated Press in Texas at the time, first had an inkling that something had gone disastrously wrong on 22 November 1963 when she bumped into a gaggle of youngsters on the street in downtown Dallas. “I came across a group of three teenagers who had just seen the president’s motorcade. They were saying, ‘Why did the motorcade go by so fast? We could hardly see the president. It was terrible’.”